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<h2 id="manifest">Manifest</h2>
<h3>Description</h3>
<p>Creates a manifest file.</p>

<p>This task can be used to write a Manifest file, optionally replacing or updating an existing
file.</p>

<p>Manifests are processed according to
the <a href="https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/jar/jar.html" target="_top">Jar
file specification</a>. Specifically, a manifest element consists of a set of attributes and
sections. These sections in turn may contain attributes. Note in particular that this may result in
manifest lines greater than 72 bytes being wrapped and continued on the next line.</p>

<p>The Apache Ant team regularly gets complaints that this task in generating invalid manifests. By
and large, this is not the case: we believe that we are following the specification to the
letter. The usual problem is that some third party manifest reader is not following the same
specification as well as they think they should; we cannot generate invalid manifest files just
because one single application is broken. Java ME runtimes appear to be particularly
troublesome.</p>

<p>If you find that Ant generates manifests incompatible with your runtime, take a manifest it has
built, fix it up however you need and switch to using the <a href="zip.html">zip</a> task to create
the JAR, feeding in the hand-crafted manifest.</p>

<h3>Parameters</h3>
<table class="attr">
  <tr>
    <th scope="col">Attribute</th>
    <th scope="col">Description</th>
    <th scope="col">Required</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>file</td>
    <td>the manifest-file to create/update.</td>
    <td>Yes</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>mode</td>
    <td>One of <q>update</q> or <q>replace</q>.</td>
    <td>No; default is <q>replace</q></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>encoding</td>
    <td>The encoding used to read the existing manifest when updating.  The task will always use
      UTF-8 when writing the manifest.</td>
    <td>No; defaults to UTF-8 encoding</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>mergeClassPathAttributes</td>
    <td>Whether to merge the <code>Class-Path</code> attributes found in different manifests (if
      updating).  If <q>false</q>, only the attribute of the most recent manifest will be
      preserved.  <em>Since Ant 1.8.0</em>.<br/>Unless you also set <var>flattenAttributes</var>
      to <q>true</q> this may result in manifests containing multiple <code>Class-Path</code>
      attributes which violates the manifest specification.</td>
    <td>No; default is <q>false</q></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>flattenAttributes</td>
    <td>Whether to merge attributes occurring more than once in a section (this can only happen for
      the <code>Class-Path</code> attribute) into a single attribute.  <em>Since Ant
      1.8.0</em>.</td>
    <td>No; default is <q>false</q></td>
  </tr>
</table>

<h3>Parameters specified as nested elements</h3>
<h4 id="attribute">attribute</h4>
<p>One attribute for the manifest file.  Those attributes that are not nested into a section will be
added to the main section.</p>
<table class="attr">
  <tr>
    <th scope="col">Attribute</th>
    <th scope="col">Description</th>
    <th scope="col">Required</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>name</td>
    <td>the name of the attribute, must match the regexp <q>[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9-_]*</q>.
    </td>
    <td>Yes</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>value</td>
    <td>the value of the attribute.</td>
    <td>Yes</td>
  </tr>
</table>

<h4>section</h4>
<p>A manifest section&mdash;you can nest <a href="#attribute">attribute</a> elements into
sections.</p>

<table class="attr">
  <tr>
    <th scope="col">Attribute</th>
    <th scope="col">Description</th>
    <th scope="col">Required</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>name</td>
    <td>the name of the section.</td>
    <td>No, defaults to the main section</td>
  </tr>
</table>

<h3>Examples</h3>

<p>Create or replace the file <samp>MANIFEST.MF</samp>. Note that the <code>Built-By</code>
attribute will take the value of the Ant property <code>${user.name}</code>. The same is true for
the <code>${version}</code> and <code>${TODAY}</code> properties. This example produces
a <samp>MANIFEST.MF</samp> that
contains <a href="https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/versioning/spec/versioning2.html#wp90779"
target="_top">package version identification</a> for the package <samp>common</samp>.</p>

<pre>
&lt;manifest file=&quot;MANIFEST.MF&quot;&gt;
  &lt;attribute name=&quot;Built-By&quot; value=&quot;${user.name}&quot;/&gt;
  &lt;section name=&quot;common&quot;&gt;
    &lt;attribute name=&quot;Specification-Title&quot; value=&quot;Example&quot;/&gt;
    &lt;attribute name=&quot;Specification-Version&quot; value=&quot;${version}&quot;/&gt;
    &lt;attribute name=&quot;Specification-Vendor&quot; value=&quot;Example Organization&quot;/&gt;
    &lt;attribute name=&quot;Implementation-Title&quot; value=&quot;common&quot;/&gt;
    &lt;attribute name=&quot;Implementation-Version&quot; value=&quot;${version} ${TODAY}&quot;/&gt;
    &lt;attribute name=&quot;Implementation-Vendor&quot; value=&quot;Example Corp.&quot;/&gt;
  &lt;/section&gt;
  &lt;section name=&quot;common/class1.class&quot;&gt;
    &lt;attribute name=&quot;Sealed&quot; value=&quot;false&quot;/&gt;
  &lt;/section&gt;
&lt;/manifest&gt;</pre>

<p>The manifest produced by the above would look like this:</p>

<pre>
Manifest-Version: 1.0
Built-By: bodewig
Created-By: Apache Ant 1.9

Name: common
Specification-Title: Example
Specification-Vendor: Example Organization
Implementation-Vendor: Example Corp.
Specification-Version: 1.2
Implementation-Version: 1.2 September 10, 2013
Implementation-Title: common

Name: common/class1.class
Sealed: false</pre>

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